Cutting through the hype.

Archive for the ‘Time Machine’ Category

Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays and enjoy whatever other holidays you enjoy around now! More on the characters in the picture in coming days–it’s a great show called Toradora, for those pre-emptive enough to have a look before I write my review.

I was totally blown away by this fantastic game! It’s got style, it’s got gameplay and it’s got some actual challenge to it. It’s not hard, so much as it makes you actually think about what you are doing. It’s not just a point and shoot action game, you have to think about how you can most effectively stop your enemies form stopping you first. Once you figure out what you need to do, it’s just a matter of doing it, unlike many modern shooters that seem to be more based on luck than actual thought and skill. You feel a much greater sense of accomplishment when you figure out how to beat a boss in this than you do in other games when you finally manage to live long enough to fill the bosses with enough bullets to drop a Tyrannosaurus Rex.

I’m sure you already know about Tim Burton’s classic gothic movie, The Nightmare Before Christmas, but it’s Halloween today, so it’s pretty much required viewing. As such, I thought it might be something interesting to talk about. Tim Burton has made many other great gothic film like Edward Scissorhands and Corpse Bride, but I feel none of them were quite as fantastic as The Nightmare Before Christmas.

Grave Of The Fireflies is a movie written and directed by Isao Takahata, with the help of Studio Ghibli’s animators. But don’t let the Ghibli association fool you; this ain’t no cheery Ghibli flick. This is World War II in Japan–this is hell on earth. This is the bitter tale of the relationship between two orphaned children, Seita and his younger sister Setsuko. The children lose their mother in the firebombing of Kobe, and their father in service to the Imperial Japanese Navy, and as a result they are forced to try to survive amidst widespread famine and the callous indifference of their countrymen. Even their relatives shrug them off, leaving them to fend for themselves.

This is the first post in a new section I’m making called Time Machine. In this section I will talk about and review old, long forgotten classics that time has hidden away in our dark and dusty closets. First up is Panzer Dragoon II Zwei. This was a truly amazing game for it’s time; the soundtrack was a feature film quality orchestral backing, which was quite impressive compared to the beeps and boops of that day and age. The gameplay was a spectacle of it’s own; nobody had really done a forced movement path shooter like that before–most certainly not that well. The graphics, of course, for the time were great…but over a decade later they have aged quite a bit. Nothing to squint at and look sideways to be able to tell what’s going on though.